New Release 26-Nov-2017 – Deprecating Locations, Publishing to eBay & new on-boarding experience !

Locations can now be deprecated – This will allow locations to be deprecated rather than deleted; locations with transactional data associated with them cannot be deleted and previously had no option for them to be removed from the system. The deprecated status can only be assigned to a location if it has no allocated/on hand/on order stock quantities.

Products can now be published to eBay directly from DEAR – Please see documentation here

User Onboarding – There have been some updates made to the user onboarding experience. This will only affect newly created accounts.

DEMO Company – You can now try out DEAR’s new features by creating a DEMO company. The DEMO company gives you access to all features and contains fictional data which is completely seperate from any other organisation you might already have as a paid subscriber. Please keep in mind that you can never convert a DEMO account to a paid subscription & the data you enter into the DEMO account will expire after 14 days.

General Changes – eCommerce sale channels

The changes listed below are applicable to all e-commerce integrations except Shopify, but are currently only visible with Amazon & eBay.

The changes mainly relate to the sale channel’s catalog, its management and its use by internal processes.

Reason for changes: The link between the product in DEAR and the product listed on a Sale channel can now be changed. This solves the problem of the case where the user has several integrations where the same products are sold, but with different SKUs.

Settings
There are 3 new options.
1. Match product (by SKU / Manually)
2. Create new product if not found by SKU (Yes / No)
3. Use Sale Channel as Master for DEAR products (Yes / No)

The first option allows you to specify how the mapping will be done in the catalog between the product listed on a Sale Channel and DEAR. The existing product will be searched for automatically by SKU, and if a product is found with a matching SKU, then the mapping is done automatically. In the case of a completely manual mapping, the user will have to choose the appropriate DEAR product SKU the Sale Channel product relates to. Please note that automatic mapping does not exclude the possibility of changing the mapping manually later. The second option is only available when “Match product by SKU” is enabled. The reason for second option is if for example there is a product (SKU) in the Sale channel that does not yet exist in DEAR, then this product can be automatically built in DEAR based on the data received about the product from a Sale channel. The possibility of a manual build is still always there through the DEAR UI. The third option is worth paying special attention to, since it has been a frequent user request. If the third option is enabled, if a product has been changed or updated in a sale channel, the linked product in DEAR will be changed to match upon catalog download. Product changes in DEAR can include changed price, name, weight, length, pictures, and other data (except SKU) based on the product data downloaded from a Sale Channel.

Catalog
Now several listed products on a Sale Channel can be linked to a single product in DEAR. However, when a single variation is sold on the sale channel, this will trigger quantity update for all linked listings within the Sale Channel. There is a special column now for manual mapping of products and families. There are only three options:

● Leave blank (do not tie to a product in DEAR)
● Link to an existing product
● Create a new product in DEAR (available if the product with the required SKU does not exist).

On the catalog tab there is also an option that allows you to switch the appearance of the catalog to “Show variations separately”. If checked off, all products without variations are displayed, and each product variation is shown as a separate product line. If this function is not enabled, products without variations are displayed and product families are displayed as a single product line. The product statuses in the catalog have also undergone some refinement, now three statuses are possible: “Not Listed”, “Listed”, “Canceled”. The ‘’Canceled” status appears for products that were removed from a Sale Channel. By default, they are not visible in the catalog, to see them you need to remove the “tick” from the “Show only active” checkbox.

Description of changes in internal processes

Downloading Catalog

Consider a catalog which contains 3 products: A, B, C. Product C has been modified in the sale channel. Next time a Catalog Download is triggered, the products: A, B, D will be visible with the following statuses:

Products A and B (the unchanged products) will remain in the catalog with a Listed status. Product D will now appear in the catalog with a Listed status, but product C’s status will change to Canceled. This process now allows us to prevent the treatment of a deleted product as Additional Charges when loading Sales from a sales channel. Instead it will just be treated as a normal stock item. Product mapping must be completed in order for sales to be successfully downloaded from your sales channels to DEAR. When sales are loaded from a sale channel and a sale contains a product that is not mapped to any product in DEAR, then this sale will be not be downloaded. However if user enabled “Match product by SKU” and/or “Create new DEAR Product” options, then DEAR will try match an unmapped product automatically or create a new product if one is not found. The user will be notified if a sale is skipped through internal messages such as: notifications, recordings in operation log, or text message on the screen (depending on the situation). Operation log and notifications – these are the first places to check if something like this does occur.